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Today Israel fired a on a UN School in Gaza killing 40, including some children. According to the IDF early reports suggest that there were mortars fired upon them from the school. Hamas has a history of using this school as a launching point for mortars, and the students as human shields. The video below shows Hamas using the school to fire mortars in October 2007:

The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), an association of the world's Islamic states, is pushing the United Nations to outlaw "defamation" of religion in general – and of one religion in particular.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. General Assembly split over the issue of gay rights on Thursday after a European-drafted statement calling for decriminalization of homosexuality prompted an Arab-backed one opposing it. Diplomats said a joint statement initiated by France and the Netherlands gathered 66 signatures in the 192-nation assembly after it was read out by Argentina at a plenary session. A rival statement, read out by Syria, gathered some 60.

The State of Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip and relinquished all governing responsibility to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in August, 2005, while continuing financial aid. Since then, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas conquered the Strip, and Palestinian terrorists in Gaza have launched more than 6,000 projectile attacks at Israeli soil, largely aimed at killing the civilian population residing in Israeli towns near the Strip. Shockingly, many in the international media, NGOs and international institutions such as the UN have greeted the illegal Palestinian attacks with forgiving silence. While whitewashing Palestinian crimes, they have fallen back on their traditional...

IKEA’s Polish Catalogue Introduces “Ian and Steve” as a Model of the New Family By Hilary White December 1, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An ad campaign in the latest catalogue by the Swedish furniture giant, IKEA, purporting to depict “modern” life, includes twelve portraits of “families” that promote a “new model of living together.” Among these is the domestic arrangement of “Ian” and “Steve,” under the slogan, “the family is ... two sister souls.” “Ian and Steve,” the ad says, have no intention of having children, but enjoy their “command centre” IKEA kitchen and herb garden. The catalogue, says a pro-family...

Snip Traditionally, pirates fell within that category of illegitimate hostiles that once included slave traders, brigands on the roads and, in wartime, unprivileged or "unlawful" enemy combatants. As Judge Nicholas Trott, presiding over a pirate trial, explained in 1718: "It is lawful for any one that takes them, if they cannot with safety to themselves bring them under some government to be tried, to put them to death." This law, of course, has changed since the 18th century. Pirates, brigands and unlawful combatants must now be tried before they can be punished. Snip The key problem is that America's NATO...

BERLIN - The number two at the German foreign ministry on Saturday said Georgia is breaking international law by launching military action to reclaim South Ossetia. Gernot Erler said Tbilisi had breached a 1992 ceasefire agreement struck with Russia over the renegade Caucasus enclave, monitored essentially by Russian peacekeepers. "In this sense, it is also a question of a violation of international law as soon as you start to go down the road of military action," Erler told German radio station NDR Info. Erler acknowledged prior provocation of the Georgian leadership from Russian-backed South Ossetia's separatists, but said he understood...

A United Nations human rights committee meeting recently in New York grilled liberal Finland about gender parity on the boards of private Finnish companies. The committee demands 50 percent representation on all private boards. Americans should be concerned because Senate Democrats will likely move to ratify the treaty that would place America in the dock to answer similar and even more outrageous questions. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has languished in the U.S. Senate for years since it was signed by Jimmy Carter in 1980. Even so, CEDAW ratification has remained a...

The historical record makes it nonsense to regard the formation of a Palestinian state as anything other than a collective, internationally-approved land grab in itself in an area mandated by the League of Nations as a Jewish homeland. For too much truth, at first sight, ne’er attracts. - George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIV The Israeli government’s present intention of holding on to a sliver of the West Bank within the perimeter of the security fence is an issue of serious import and is widely regarded as an illegal land grab. Yet the issue is by no means...

Whether out of hubris or principle, or both, the United States has not understood its support for international law and institutions to imply a surrender of its own commitment to self-government. As the international system became more powerful, and international law diverged from U.S. law, the United States inevitably began to show unilateralist tendencies -- not simply out of self-interest but because the United States is committed to democratic self-government. The continental European democracies, with their monarchical histories, their lingering aristocratic cultures, and their tendency to favor centralized, bureaucratic governance, have always been considerably less democratic... The American and French...

Roe v. Wade Goes Global by: Jeremy Hempel, February 01, 2008 There is a trend visible in the international community as the right to abortion slowly becomes international law, a report issued last fall by the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (CFHRI) shows. This all started in 1996 when a conference of agencies, treaty bodies, and organizations was held in Glen Cove, New York, according to Rights By Stealth: The Role of UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies in the Campaign for an International Right to Abortion. The official name for this meeting was the “Roundtable of Human Rights Treaty...

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The agency that oversees training and hiring standards for police departments in Maryland is looking at a proposal that would let noncitizens with green cards become police officers. The proposal is being championed by Montgomery County Police Chief Thomas Manger. He said it doesn't make sense that legal immigrants can join the U.S. military but can't become law enforcement officers. The Maryland Police Training Commission could vote on the issue next month. Critics said it would be difficult to check the backgrounds of noncitizens applying to be officers, and they said the proposal could allow terrorists to...

It seems rather déjà vu to be contemplating a Balkan deadline again, but that is where we are with Kosovo. The UN established Monday, December 10 as the date by which Kosovo's future constitutional status was to be made clear. It is, sadly, anything but clear: the Albanian Kosovars expect independence, which Belgrade refuses to concede. We should not underestimate the volatility of this situation. While both Kosovar and Serb leaders claim to oppose the use of force to achieve their aims, the same cannot be said of the ethnic paramilitary groupings. After 78 days of bombing, Milosevic conceded to...

A Deeper Understanding of the Threat of International Law In the March/April 2006 Home School Court Report, I made the case for a parental rights amendment to the United States Constitution. Even though parental rights are recognized as a fundamental right under current Supreme Court doctrine, there are two threats to recognition of this principle. First, a growing number of Supreme Court justices refuse to recognize that parental rights are a fundamental right. Justice Antonin Scalia, a noted conservative, holds that parental rights are not judicially enforceable at all until there is a specific parental rights provision in the Constitution....

Death Penalty Case Puts Bush and Texas at Odds Over Mexican's FateSunday, October 07, 2007 WASHINGTON — President Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the state's execution of a Mexican national for the brutal killing of two teenage girls. The case of Jose Ernesto Medellin has become a confusing test of presidential power that the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears the case this week, ultimately will sort out. The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated...

WASHINGTON - To put it bluntly, Texas wants President Bush to get out of the way of the state's plan to execute a Mexican for the brutal killing of two teenage girls. Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the execution of Jose Ernesto Medellin in what has become a confusing test of presidential power that the Supreme Court, which hears the case this week, ultimately will sort out. The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated...

by Steven ErteltLifeNews.com EditorAugust 31, 2007Managua Nicaragua (LifeNews.com) -- The Supreme Court in Nicaragua is expected to issue a ruling on the nation's abortion ban in the next two weeks. The Central American nation adopted the complete ban last November that prohibits all abortions, including those for rape and incest or to save the life of the mother.Abortion advocates, led by the New York-based Americas for Human Rights Watch, have taken the law to court.The nation's high court is expected to deliver a decision in the case soon and it could result in the undermining of other pro-life laws in...

The European Commission has issued formal charges against Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker, alleging it has abused its dominant market position with respect to its biggest rival, Advanced Micro Devices. Antitrust regulators in Brussels have sent Intel a statement of objection outlining the charges, according to a person close to the investigation. Details have not been revealed but they are expected to include allegations that it undermined competition by offering rebates to PC makers that effectively shut out AMD from the local microprocessor market.It has also faced accusations that it Intel could face fines worth up to 10 per cent...

Woo-hoo! "The Simpsons Movie" has won its name back on the Internet. A UN agency has ruled that ownership of the domain name thesimpsonsmovie.com must be handed to News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox, which owns the rights to the film and the popular TV series. Twentieth Century Fox complained to the World Intellectual Property Organization over the use of the film's name in the Internet address of a site registered by Keith Malley of New York. Fox lawyers claimed Malley was using the address to divert Internet users to a website that included sexually explicit depictions of several characters from...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court threw out death sentences for three Texas killers Wednesday because of problems with instructions given jurors who were deciding between life in prison and death. In the case of LaRoyce Lathair Smith, the court set aside the death penalty for the second time. It also reversed death sentences for Brent Ray Brewer and Jalil Abdul-Kabir. The cases all stem from jury instructions that Texas hasn't used since 1991. Under those rules, courts have found that jurors were not allowed to give sufficient weight to factors that might cause them to impose a life sentence...